iovetea wrote:yes but its hard to trust someone when its involves money, also i wish it were so easy that you could go by the price. i paid good bucks for fake pu erhs. I even had one with a berry in it.

That sucks. Paying good cash for a fake is a good lesson, but not an enjoyable one. For what it's worth, I have seen feathers and sticks in puerh, and heard of crazy things like a fingernail! Doesn't exactly mean that it's fake, though I tend to not want to brew things I find in my puerh that aren't puerh.

I was taught that this is part of why we rinse!

the point is not the berry, but a berry has moisture and moisture develops molt... so even if i take it out the pu erh might not be healthy...ps in hong kong old women died because of mold in pu erh according to my tea magazine

Again...EEEEEEWWWWW! I was envisioning a berry that was totally dried up. Now I am picturing a nice bing, maybe a bit wet stored but lovely and crisp, and then I turn it over and BOOM: big, moldy, multi-colored, fuzzy, half-dollar-sized nugget of grossness. And yet here I sit, still drinking my tea.....

It's funny, I have noticed a lot of mistrust and even downright paranoia in Asia having to do with puerh. So many people, especially older people, especially older woman who have children, when they find out I drink pu, give me these HUGE lectures about how I need to be careful because it can kill you!

But I totally believe it. Super important to maintain that healthy storage!

why would you trust your life to people who can't even do the simple work of sorting the berries out??and why the hell do you have to pay that super crazy moon prices for pu erh, if the quality isn't even so high that they can't stop berries from being in the tea???

That's why it is so important as a consumer to find vendors you trust, and to learn enough about the products you consume to not only keep yourself (and your guests) safe, but also to encourage a better marketplace by not giving your $$ to those bad people!

Besides, I would bet dollars to pesos that more people die from many other normal things like bees and lightning and bad meat than from drinking puerh. Not a fact at all, just my supposition. Mostly if you get bad mold it can make your throat itchy.

needaTEAcher wrote:So many people, especially older people, especially older woman who have children, when they find out I drink pu, give me these HUGE lectures about how I need to be careful because it can kill you!

Nonsense. Even my Taiwanese ex used to tell me that: don't drink Chinese tea at all, very bad for you.

Awww, I am sad to hear "overprice". There are some cheap puerhs and expensive examples of any tea (some of the high-end Darjeelings run hundreds of dollars for small quantities!)

There is a lot of work and effort going into making puerh, aging it properly, and getting it to your cup! Imagine the warehouses with full staff making sure you get good tea that is berry-free, with healthy levels of our microbe friends, and the cost that goes into controlling the humidity, temperature, airflow, and pays the staff!

But, honestly, if you think it is overpriced, don't buy it! Personally, I think there are some pretty great puerh deals out there. I just bought a 400g bing of 2010 cooked pu from Kunming Factory for $10. 400g for $10. Pretty cheap!!! Not the best tea ever, but pretty good for daily drinking.

So, ilovetea, what kind of tea do you like, and what is the price range that you consider to be not overpriced?

needaTEAcher wrote:Awww, I am sad to hear "overprice". There are some cheap puerhs and expensive examples of any tea (some of the high-end Darjeelings run hundreds of dollars for small quantities!)

There is a lot of work and effort going into making puerh, aging it properly, and getting it to your cup! Imagine the warehouses with full staff making sure you get good tea that is berry-free, with healthy levels of our microbe friends, and the cost that goes into controlling the humidity, temperature, airflow, and pays the staff!

But, honestly, if you think it is overpriced, don't buy it! Personally, I think there are some pretty great puerh deals out there. I just bought a 400g bing of 2010 cooked pu from Kunming Factory for $10. 400g for $10. Pretty cheap!!! Not the best tea ever, but pretty good for daily drinking.

So, ilovetea, what kind of tea do you like, and what is the price range that you consider to be not overpriced?

well i like japanese green tea or taiwan oolong and i would pay high price for quality....

yes 10 bucks is ok... but there is no reason why a raw pu erh only a few years old should cost 50 dollars or more.. well i don't mind paying that for good tea (well i know pu erh is good too when 30 years old or older)but i believe young raw pu erh definitely should have cheaper prices....i mean after all its a gamble if the tea will be really awesome one day

needaTEAcher wrote:Awww, I am sad to hear "overprice". There are some cheap puerhs and expensive examples of any tea (some of the high-end Darjeelings run hundreds of dollars for small quantities!)

There is a lot of work and effort going into making puerh, aging it properly, and getting it to your cup! Imagine the warehouses with full staff making sure you get good tea that is berry-free, with healthy levels of our microbe friends, and the cost that goes into controlling the humidity, temperature, airflow, and pays the staff!

But, honestly, if you think it is overpriced, don't buy it! Personally, I think there are some pretty great puerh deals out there. I just bought a 400g bing of 2010 cooked pu from Kunming Factory for $10. 400g for $10. Pretty cheap!!! Not the best tea ever, but pretty good for daily drinking.

So, ilovetea, what kind of tea do you like, and what is the price range that you consider to be not overpriced?

also it would be funny if pu erh would be the only tea were you pay a fair price for the work.... i mean its not that you pay the fair price for oolong from anxi or wenshan, why should raw pu erh be any different??

It tastes nice. Smooth and solid on the front end, but a bit hollow on the back end. It isn't bitter, but the flavor isn't amazing. All in all, depending on the pot I use to brew it, it ranged from awful (in my machine-pressed super-cheap zini pot) to pretty alright (porcelain), to actually surprisingly nice (in my nicer zini pot, my teacher's zhuni pot, my heini pot, or my mao lvni pot). This isn't just the first pu I found, though, so it is not indicative of all $10 shou cha dai bings! I went to maybe 7-10 shops and tasted, I don't know, ballpark maybe 40 or more teas! This was the cheapest I bought, and I got two disks, one to age (just to see!) and one for now.

iovetea wrote:also it would be funny if pu erh would be the only tea were you pay a fair price for the work.... i mean its not that you pay the fair price for oolong from anxi or wenshan, why should raw pu erh be any different??

2-Why do you think these other teas sell for a price that isn't fair? Personally, I most certainly pay top dollar for good tea in any category! I think anyone should be willing to pay fair prices for better quality of any product. It is just a matter of what price range you are comfortable in financially and what quality level you enjoy more (sometimes many people prefer the taste of lower-quality tea!). I merely mention the storage aspect to say that aged teas tend to cost more for a number of reasons. As per young puerh teas, I have found that young shou tends to cost more than young sheng. If you want to buy and age, I have seen teas for amazingly small prices (just dollars for 100g tuos, or super-cheap mini-tuos by the kilo, not to mention bricks, small disks, mushrooms, and loose leaf). If you want cheaper priced shou or sheng, you can find it.

Ok with wenshan i was just guessing because i was so fascinating by the way they portrayed tea culture in the tea magazine, but with anxi tie guan yin i saw several documentaries where tie guan yin producers got really bad prices for their work, for really good tea.

Well i don't want the best pu erh in the world, i just want complex flavor were you think you doing a journey while drinking. And yes I'm aware that legend has it that pu erh gets drunken because of the cha qi and oolong you drink for flavor.

Anyway for cheap but good pu erhs i think you either have to live in a different country then me, be able to speak mandarin or cantonese or at least know much about pu erh.

The "older is better" mantra probably stems from marketability and rarity as much as anything. People love to tell you how the tree supplying this tea is 800 years old and blah blah blah. The fact is, plenty of the aged cakes that people lust after today were made with plantation tea. So, while the age is a factor, take it with a grain of salt.

Meh. I don't care what other people are lusting after. Honestly, I don't even care much for old tea. I've tried a few examples of older teas from nadacha, hou de, and mandarin's tea room, and they were very nice, but I didn't like them anywhere near as much as I like my favorite young spring shengs. I'm not tasting through young sheng so that I can buy intolerable bitterness with the intention to age it into something that maybe I might have a small chance of liking someday. I'm tasting through samples so that I can find more teas that are anywhere near as good as, for example, YS 2012 Spring Xi Kong & Jia Bu. These teas are incredible, they are delicious and make me feel great as they are with no aging necessary, and I've tasted a lot of teas but nothing has come anywhere close to being as good. I would love to find more but there are a lot of teas that are billed as old tree & high elevation that only just taste OK.

iovetea wrote:Ok with wenshan i was just guessing because i was so fascinating by the way they portrayed tea culture in the tea magazine, but with anxi tie guan yin i saw several documentaries where tie guan yin producers got really bad prices for their work, for really good tea.

Well i don't want the best pu erh in the world, i just want complex flavor were you think you doing a journey while drinking. And yes I'm aware that legend has it that pu erh gets drunken because of the cha qi and oolong you drink for flavor.

Anyway for cheap but good pu erhs i think you either have to live in a different country then me, be able to speak mandarin or cantonese or at least know much about pu erh.

If you had a time machine and could go back in time to like 10 years ago, plus some of the aforementioned language skills, you might be able to find truly cheap tea that was truly good. Maybe